I'm Corbett Barr, founder of Fizzle and Palapa, and co-host of The Fizzle Show. Sign up for updates and I'll send you new posts as soon as they're published.

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“It's so good! I look forward to it and it's one of the only things I open every time in my inbox! I also forward it a lot!” – Alison C.

Any project or system that involves people, no matter how well-intentioned, eventually loses luster once the initial excitement and momentum wears off. Everything becomes a job after long enough, no matter how infatuated you were in the beginning.

My first day on the job as a consultant in a boutique Fortune 500 tech consulting firm went like this. I took the 6am flight from Portland to Houston, arrived at work groggy but got right down to business.

In the most recent season of Homeland, the main character Carrie Mathison decides purposefully to stop taking medication that she uses to treat bi-polar disorder. She’s an ex-CIA agent and there’s an international terrorist catastrophe brewing.

It's easy to fall into a trap in the day-to-day and week-to-week work we do. Small tasks and to-dos creep onto our lists and weigh on us, making progress towards our bigger picture harder and harder to achieve.

Today we have a great question from listener Paul Minors: “I’d love some help with growing product revenue. I’d love to hear your advice around the steps you would take after launching a digital product to get more revenue from it.” This is a great question and something we spend a lot of time thinking about at Fizzle.

Email is still one of the best tools for growing your business, but many people don’t understand how to really make it work. In today’s episode, I answer two very important listener questions about email.

In today’s episode, I share my approach to crafting one of the most important things to any business: the company operating system. Just like your computer has an operating system that defines how it functions, your business (even if you’re just a one person business) needs an operating system.

In today’s episode of the show, I share four simple practices and apps that improve my productivity every day. I’ve tried lots of productivity hacks over the years, and these are the ones that have stuck because they’re easy and effective.

Over the next week or two, I’m going to publish daily audio-only podcast episodes covering several of the excellent listener questions I’ve gotten recently. Our regular weekly episodes (including video) will still air on Wednesdays.

In today’s episode: nine essential questions to ask yourself when choosing a business idea, what’s lost when most people work from home, and how to conquer the last mile of a project. Listen to the audio stream here (or subscribe to the podcast in iTunes): Lifestyle Business Weekly is a show and weekly curated email for people interested in lifestyle business and independent entrepreneurship.

In today’s episode, we talk about happiness and productivity, building company culture and how I turn one piece of content into nine (and gain 550% reach for just a couple hours of effort). I really like how the visual effects turned out on this one.

We’re five episodes deep into the Lifestyle Business Weekly video show, and now you can listen on the go. That’s right, we’ve turned the show into a podcast, and new episodes will be released each week!

In today’s episode: the best places to live and work around the world, building and working on remote teams and two viewer questions about social media. Or, listen to the audio stream here: Ask a question for an upcoming episode.

It’s Episode 3! In this episode: A Roadmap for Small Business Success Comparing Yourself to the Wrong People Building a Business Around Your Ideal Lifestyle Or, stream the audio via SoundCloud here: Thank you all for the amazing feedback and comments on the first two episodes!

In the past couple of weeks since the big story about Amazon’s broken work culture, the web has been abuzz with stories of big companies with long hours, demeaning politics and impossible standards. As you may have read in the articles like Work Hard, Live Well, “the research is clear: beyond ~40–50 hours per week, the marginal returns from additional work decrease rapidly and quickly become negative.” Long hours backfire for people and for companies.

I’ll be a speaker/coach/”trail master” at this year’s Pioneer Nation retreat, hosted by Chris Guillebeau and team on October 1-3, 2015. This year’s event is at The Resort at The Mountain, about an hour from Portland, OR.

When you launch an online product, like an ebook or a course and get no real sales, the first step is to diagnose the problem. Generally, either: You didn’t have enough people visit the sales page, or People visited your site, but they weren’t convinced enough to buy, or Some combination of the above (not enough visitors combined with low conversions) From a totally-ballpark-sales-conversions-perspective, you might expect 1 out of every 50-200 people who visit your sales page to purchase something (a 0.5% to 2% conversion rate).

On the Fizzle team, we often find ourselves in a collective state of mind where we’re frustrated with our business and all we haven’t been able to accomplish yet. Yet I know people look at our business and just *wish* they could have built a fraction of what we already have.